Nonprofits need marketing automation, plain and simple. Specifically because marketing automation can help nonprofits make the most of their marketing budgets. In this series, we are talking about the ways that nonprofits and marketing automation can work together to generate more giving.
Automation and Analytics for Nonprofits
With 57 percent of nonprofits claiming they don’t get the most out of donor data when crafting fundraising strategies, it is clear they can benefit from basic marketing automation capabilities. These capabilities allow nonprofit organizations to use the data they collect to communicate more effectively with existing donors, and to also encourage new donors.
Automation and analytics are the cornerstones of any successful marketing automation campaign. See how these two strategies help organizations make it to the next level.
How Does Automation Work?
Automation might seem as if it is the wave of the future, but companies are using it right now to improve their bottom line, and nonprofits can benefit, as well. Nonprofits can benefit from using automation because they often struggle with manpower. There aren’t enough people to do the work that needs to be done, but marketing automation can step in and do a lot of the work for them!
There isn’t a limit to what nonprofits can do with automation. They can trigger email campaigns to begin as soon as someone donates money, or they can use automation to nurture potential donors. Organizations can also use automation to create digital profiles of leads, segment those leads, and qualify them. This is just a snapshot of the power provided by automation.
Analyze Results with Analytics
Anyone who works at a nonprofit knows the importance of numbers. Numbers tell a story in a way that nothing else can, so you have to dig deep and look at the numbers to evaluate your success. Marketing automation is no different. Analytics play a very important role when running marketing automation campaigns.
Lead Liaison has tons of base-level reporting features. We also have an add-on called Revelation™, which is used to organize and analyze data. This enterprise analytics suite provides visual and interactive data, making it easy to see what is working and what isn’t working. Once you know what’s getting results and what isn’t, you can make changes to your campaign. That is the great thing about marketing automation. Campaigns can get changed and tweaked at any time. Then, the results can be measured in real-time to see if those changes helped or hurt the campaign.
Marketing automation is full of possibilities, and basic automation and analytics just scratch the surface. This technique is full of possibilities for nonprofits. Nonprofits that are serious about increasing donations will benefit from this technique.
To learn more about how marketing automation can help nonprofits increase giving, nurture donors, and empower their communities, click here!
Your organization just attended a big marketing event. There was a lot of planning that went into your organzation’s participation at this event. You spent lots of marketing dollars trying to make an impact, and hopefully creating a lot of leads. And it worked! Your onsite representatives collected tons of leads! You probably already know that your event follow-up is important, but did you know just how important it really is? And, how rare it is?!
Why is the timing of your event follow-up important?
According to recent research from Certain published on MarketingProfs, “some 73.5% of respondents say their firm takes four days or longer to follow up with event leads. Just 2% of respondents say their firm follows up with event leads on the same day.” Most respondants to this research said that the reason they do not follow up quickly is because of how long it takes to prepare the outreach and that they do not have the tools to speed up the process.
Prompt event follow-up is critical. It allows your organization to stand out from the competition because it shows that you care enough to make that follow-up a priority.
Event lead capture methods, like our app GoCapture!™, are an important part of any marketing automation platform. This functionality allows companies to streamline thier event follow-up in a way that is personal, instantaneous, and repeatable. Our app allows onsite representatives to collect lead information quickly (without losing any valuable information), by scanning a badge, a business card, by manual entry, or even syncing with a registration list. Then, once that information is captured, it can be automatically uploaded to our database, segmented, and placed into a nuture campaign.
That nurture campaign can contain releveant event follow-up information in the form of email, text message, postcard, or even a handwritten letter (our personal favorite!). Whatever the method of outreach, the message should be well thought-out.
What kind of message to you send in your event follow-up?
First and foremost, your event follow-up should identify the specific show by name, within the first paragraph or even in the subject line. This immediately validates your outreach, which should encourage recipients to read further. And, don’t forget to include the information from the onsite representative that the prospect came into contact with. That will help create a personal connection with your outreach.
The conversations that onsite representatives have with leads can be breif, or very surface level. Your event follow-up messaging should offer a range of options for further engagement – also known as your call-to-actions (CTAs). You really want to appeal to a range of prospects at various stages of the selling cycle. You could offer a free download of a high-performing white paper, offer a free demonstration, or simply encourage your prospect to sign up for your company newsletter. These clickthrough options will help sales prioritze which leads should be called first and will also allow for further segmentation.
Lead Nurturing is dying quickly, and marketers are to blame. People are overwhelmed by massive amounts of email; and even your biggest fans are starting to see “educational” materials as being spam.
If I want to learn, I tend to go to a podcast, blog, or specific website for information. Information has lost its value in today’s “Google world,” in most cases with evergreen content. However, automated messaging has one very important purpose: drawing attention to timely content.
If you are not sending content that is directly tied to the point in time that you are sending it, you are wasting your time and the time of your audience. And, your lead nurturing efforts are going out the window.
Instead, send timely/relevant information to nurture your leads. Examples include:
Special time sensitive offers (Your $50 coupon is going to expire tomorrow!)
Seasonal information (Christmas is 1 month away and if you don’t buy your tree right now, you’re going to pay twice as much and get a brown tree!)
Date specific information (Your check-up is coming up in 3 weeks!)
Contact your representative and let them know to vote a certain way for our organization
Your contract is up for renewal
You are offering a webinar or attending a trade show and would like to include them
If there isn’t a time sensitive reason to open and act upon your message, 92% of all people that read the first line in your email will delete it/push it off with the intention of reading late – or worse, unsubscribe! Of the 8% that do read your entire email, 96% of those readers will not act upon your email.
A few tips to get a higher response rate:
Reference why you are writing to them at this time. Do so in the first sentence.
Let them know a consequence of not acting in the next 48 hours.
If information is not time sensitive, don’t send it, or wait until that information has a time sensitive meaning.
If your information is “education-only” consider sending a one sentence email letting them know that based on what you knew about that person, that you thought they would find a way to immediately benefit from the information…and send it as a link to a landing page. No proThis will build some level of curiosity, and the brevity of the email isn’t as likely to get 1,000 of your contacts to roll their eyes in unison when they open your email. Also it will give you a much more organic “content garden” which could help SEO and future marketing efforts.
In the case of lead nurturing campaigns, less is best. Your messages should build excitement to the recipient. In doing so, you will be adding to your brand’s emotional value; and increasing response rates by 100% or more.
Want to learn how to automate time-sensitive messages as a part of your lead nurturing? Let us show you how!
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.png00Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2017-11-16 11:21:182017-11-16 11:21:58Lead Nurturing Using Email
Allen, TX – Lead Liaison, a leading sales and marketing solutions provider, announced today the launch of their Sales and Marketing University. The learning platform is designed to be a streamlined source of information and education pertaining to the products and services offered by Lead Liaison. Plans have been established to include premium content from third parties as well. Over time the company will add valuable course content to help individuals and companies with general sales and marketing concepts, strategies, and core principles.
An overwhelming increase in new customers and general demand pushed Lead Liaison in the direction to create a way for their clients to learn more, faster. The University is intended to be a very broad marketplace for learning; a central repository for premium sales and marketing content.
Lead Liaison’s Sales and Marketing University awards certifications and badges as each course is mastered. It also hosts training videos for students to learn at their own pace and provides students with the tools they need to become proficient in their marketing and sales solutions.
“Our company was granted early access to Lead Liaison’s Sales and Marketing University,” says Crystal Berry, Marketing Manager at Validis. “There is so much helpful information! I plan on having both our sales and marketing teams collect certifications in all courses. I’ve communicated with our CEO that the sales team getting certified in marketing and sales automation is a value add for them. We could all benefit from knowing more about how to be more effective and efficient with our sales and marketing efforts.”
In addition to receiving access to Lead Liaison’s world-class education resources, the Sales and Marketing University has also been included with the company’s onboarding services. This integration helps introduce new customers to Lead Liaison’s capabilities by showing them the services available and ensuring that their experience is as simple and streamlined as possible.
About Lead Liaison Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.png00Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2017-11-14 07:00:012021-11-12 13:04:19Lead Liaison Launches Sales and Marketing University
Allen, TX – Lead Liaison and Administrate teamed up this week to conduct a live webinar covering challenges that training and development companies face when managing their marketing and sales efforts. “How Training Companies Can Scale Marketing” focused on the many ways marketing automation complements and supports training efforts.
The webinar had a fantastic turnout. Companies across the globe dialed in to listen to hosts Ryan Schefke, Customer Success Manager at Lead Liaison, and Troy Michels, Chief Product Officer at Administrate, discuss their joint solutions.
What’s specifically unique about this webinar is that Administrate is a Lead Liaison customer as well as a partner. “We use our own tools in addition to Lead Liaison for our sales process, so we know how this works first hand,” says Troy Michels at Administrate.
The event focused on how training and development companies can scale marketing, pass qualified leads to sales, and how to progress those leads through the sales funnel to revenue. It comes on the heels of a recent integration announced earlier in the year. Businesses can now combine the power of both solutions to strengthen relationships, provide sales insight, scale operations, and manage training sales funnels.
The event also revealed some interesting statistics about training companies. Less than half of attendees (42%) reported experience with marketing automation, and 46% of attendees were not able to say with confidence that their leads were being nurtured. Sixty-three percent of attendees said they could not confidently predict revenue for the next month. The webinar addressed how Lead Liaison’s marketing automation solution, paired with Administrate’s training management system, could automate nurturing and help predict revenue.
A recording of the webinar can be found here. To learn more about Administrate and Lead Liaison’s partnership, visit this webpage. Lead Liaison and Administrate used GoToWebinar as their webinar hosting platform, however they managed the entire invitation, reminder, and follow-up process inside of Lead Liaison’s marketing automation platform. More information on how to run a webinar can be found here.
About Administrate
Administrate is one of Scotland’s fastest growing startups and serves hundreds of customers, thousands of users, and millions of students across six continents. In January 2016, Administrate was selected as one of the UK’s most promising startups for Tech City UK’s Upscaleaccelerator program. In 2017 the company was selected as one of the “Top 20 Training Delivery Companies” in the world by TrainingIndustry.com. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland, the firm also has a USA office in Bozeman, Montana, and Middle East presence in Beirut, Lebanon. The company employs more than 60 people globally.
About Lead Liaison Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.png00Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2017-11-10 10:45:202017-11-13 10:12:00Lead Liaison and Administrate Team Up to Educate Training Companies on Scaling Marketing
Marketing teams utilize online marketing activities to directly impact lead generation. It is no secret that leveraging data from various marketing channels provides companies with the ability to determine ROI and increase sales. Because of the nature of this relationship, a company’s marketing team and sales team should be closely aligned in order to close deals faster and collaborate on the best plan of action to effectively reel in potential customers. Too often, companies maintain a disconnect between these departments and lose out on profits. Consider the following problems and potential solutions to strengthen your business today.
Problem: Lack of Interdepartmental Communication
Many companies find communication between departments to be difficult, so identifying the communication “pain points” is the first step in the process. You marketing team and your sales team should work with each other, not against each other.
Solutions:
Funnel Location: The sales team needs to be assured that the marketing team is only passing along qualified, sales-ready leads. When a lead is established by marketing, it is important that the sales team knows what stage of the funnel the user is in. This allows a sales rep to tailor their approach when reaching out and presenting their sales pitch to the end consumer.
Tracking progress: The sales team can also find out the needs of their end consumers using online platforms if they are trained in the analyzation of prospect activity. All data, including emails and chat archives, should be sent over to sales once a new lead is acquired. If your marketing automation platform tracks this automatically, that’s a real bonus.
Follow-ups: To be certain that no lead falls through the cracks, both departments should create a plan of action to follow-up with any lost leads identified throughout the online lead generation process. This should be completed on a monthly basis and can often be done by using a CRM tool.
Problem: Lack of Engagement on Social Platforms
Sales teams do not usually engage with leads through social platforms. It is imperative to teach the sales team to pay close attention to social media outlets and engage with possible leads when appropriate.
Solution:
Utilize LinkedIn and Other Online Social Tools: Both the sales and marketing teams should network with potential leads and current clients online. In addition, these platforms can be an effective way to gather information about a lead and add more ammunition to the sales pitch. Solutions like our social append allow for social data to enhance prospect profiles. Salespeople should also track one-on-one social engagement as notes in their CRM.
By effectively synchronizing marketing and sales teams’ efforts, companies are bound to see an increase in ROI from online campaigns.
Author Bio: Tracy Julien is the VP of Marketing for GuidedChoice, a leader in retirement investment planning. Tracy received her Bachelor’s degree from Ohio University in 2000 and her MBA in Marketing Management from DePaul University in 2006. She has over 15 years of experience working for multi-national companies. Tracy specializes in consumer marketing, focusing heavily on marketing strategy, global brand management, customer experience, and product innovation.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.png00Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2017-11-08 07:30:412017-11-08 07:30:41Converting More Online Leads: Sales Team & Marketing Team Coordination
The only good newsletter that I ever received was in 2008. I’m not kidding. At the bottom of the newsletter was an offer that simply said:
For the first 20 people to respond to this email, you will receive a pair of tickets to our suite at the next New England Patriots game.
I won, and the rest is history.
I remained a “fan” of that newsletter for about two years…mainly in hopes that I would see another offer hidden inside. Since then, I’ve received hundreds -no THOUSANDS – of newsletters with sources ranging from neighbors updating me on their extended families (sorry, I don’t care.) to vendors (boring… congrats you made a bunch of money last quarter… I don’t care.) to those trying to sell me on their brilliance.
The point is: nobody likes newsletters. Even people that signed up for them, and appear to have read your newsletter, probably didn’t read it. If you insist on periodic communication as part of your required role, please consider doing the following to make things a little more palatable to your audience:
Offer them something of value (and no, we’re not talking about content). Perhaps it’s a contest, a game, a trial of your product, an invitation to meet for coffee… anything that gives a feeling that is warmer than a Christmas Fruitcake.
Personalize the message. If you expect me to take the time to read your content, at least take the time to know who you are sending your information to. If I bought a car from you last month, please don’t send me information about how badly you need to sell me a car this month because it’s President’s Day (or any other lame, manufactured reason).
Segment your messaging. If I have to read 3 pages of information to find the two sentences that I care about; I won’t do it. If you are lucky, I’m going to give you 16 words to win my interest. If you can’t do that; I’m very likely to unsubscribe from your messaging forever. If you can entice me to click on information, and then follow that up with a special offer, you just might have my interest for many months.
In summary, with marketing automation and other analytic capabilities that are available to you, you would be amiss to send a generic newsletter in today’s business world. Be creative, be fun, and focus on building emotion, not just throwing as much content onto as many people as possible. Reface your newsletter, and watch your results blossom. And if you are ready to see the many other ways marketing automation can help your business be BETTER, let us know. We’d love to give you a quick tour.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.png00Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2017-10-31 14:51:072017-10-31 14:51:07What NOT To Do When Creating Your Newsletter
When a donation is made, data is collected via iDonate’s web form. The integration with iDonate’s web form and Lead Liaison’s marketing automation suite allows United way to create a new Prospect if one does not already exist, or use an existing Prospect, and record the donation in Lead Liaison.
iDonate forms were then integrated to work with Lead Liaison’s Custom Activities in order to track name, description, donation amount, and form ID. Doing this allows the donation to be associated with a visitor’s activity and profile. The nonprofit organization can now track donor interests, including page visits, document downloads, tracking URL clicks, social post engagement, email engagement, video engagement, and more. With this enhancement, donations become another activity in the overall engagement profile of a donor. Profiles continue to evolve through the donor lifecycle.
Why is This Important for Nonprofits?
Knowing much more about donors makes it easier for nonprofits to communicate with their audience, increase brand awareness, and consequently increase donations. In addition, this integration also allows nonprofits to retarget people who visit the donation page, but do not donate. United Way, for example, designed a process so that if someone visits a donation page and doesn’t donate within one hour, an email is sent asking them to reconsider. If they do donate, or if they received an email through Lead Liaison in the last three days, that request will not be sent.
Results Matter
United Way can use the information collected to do more omni-channel marketing within Lead Liaison, all initiated from a donation. Lead Liaison and iDonate help United Way make sure there is no lead left behind. As a result, United Way is up 57% in donations for the trailing five month period (April 15, 2017 – September 13, 2017) against the same time period one year ago (April 15, 2016 – September 13, 2016).
About iDonate
iDonate makes digital fundraising easy for nonprofits with a digital fundraising platform and fundraising services to raise more money with less work.
About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).
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Let’s face it: time is not the sales person’s friend. I’ve seen far too many talented people fail in B2B sales because they couldn’t manage time. You certainly don’t need to waste time on courting unqualified prospects, hopelessly dialing bad numbers, and sending nurture email after nurture email to the “call me next year” crowd.
Having a CRM like Microsoft Dynamics will certainly help. You can use it to schedule tasks, keep prospects organized, and track your opportunities. But that’s just step one. You’ve still got to figure which prospects are worth your time and make sure you keep the data up to date.
That’s where marketing automation like Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation™ comes in. We have multiple ways to help you make the most of your time and find the right prospects. In fact, we’ve got five major ways that sales teams benefit from Lead Liaison and Microsoft Dynamics integrated together.
1. Get quality Leads straight to your CRM.
Adding qualified Leads to your pipeline isn’t an easy task. By far, the most time-consuming thing in a sales person’s life is prospecting. In most industries, you’re lucky if 10% of the people you talk to are qualified (even less with cold email and cold phone calls). Even if the prospect has gone so far as to fill out a demo request, they might just be another sales person trying to sell to you!
Lead Liaison tracks visitors to your website and scores them based on engagement. Every time they engage with a piece of content, their score goes up. We also grade them based on your organization’s ideal buyer profile from A-F. When we know that they’re a good fit and have shown real interest, we can send an alert, sync them to Dynamics as a Lead, and even assign them to the appropriate prospect owner.
Now you’ve got a steady stream of Leads in your CRM that you know are qualified.
2. Easily gauge your prospect’s interest.
How many times have you sent an email to a prospect and never heard back from them? I probably just described 95% of your prospecting emails. Even once you have a steady stream of Leads from your site, what’s the point if you don’t know who’s responding to your communications?
Our Send and Track plugin has you covered. We can tell you when your prospect has opened your email or clicked on a link inside. We can even send a browser alert to Google Chrome so you know right away. You get to learn who is interested in what you’re sending, even if they don’t respond. And, because we track them from the moment they click the link, you get to see what they’re looking for on your site.
What does this have to do with Dynamics? Our plugin lets send a copy to your CRM. That means the email and its contents are logged for your reference. If the prospect doesn’t exist in Dynamics already, we’ll create a new Lead for you. No need to manually create new records after a cold email campaign!
3. Automate your nurture.
We’ve all run into prospects that just aren’t qualified yet. They could be the perfect fit for your organization, but for one reason or another a deal just isn’t going to happen right now. However, it’s important you don’t lose track of these people. They’re the ones helping you make quota six months from now. If you’ve got an opportunity in Dynamics that has stalled out, we’re here to help.
With Lead Liaison, you can drop these prospects into an automated nurture campaign. The prospect will get occasional follow ups, interesting articles, or links to relevant videos straight to their email. The emails come from your email address, signed by you, and if the prospect replies, it goes to your inbox. You just put them in the nurture campaign, and we do the rest on your behalf.
We’re not limited to email, either. Lead Liaison supports multi-channel marketing efforts. You could automatically send them a postcard, have us text them for you, or write a handwritten letter on your behalf. You can even choose the type of handwriting we’ll use!
4.Always have the most up-to-date information.
Have you ever called an old prospect in your database to reconnect and found their number was no longer valid? Or worse, they didn’t work there anymore? It’s happened to all of us. Now you must take the time to find a new contact, get the right info, and hopefully get it done in time to finish your tasks for the day.
That is, unless you had Lead Liaison. We sync our data with Microsoft Dynamics every five minutes. If a prospect has filled out a form or marketing has just updated your master list of key accounts (without telling you… again), we’ll know about it and send that new information to Dynamics.
But it gets even cooler than that. We use the prospect’s email address to crawl social media websites like LinkedIn and Twitter. We capture data like their company and job title, and we check back in with them from time to time. If we’ve noticed a change, we update it on their profile. And yes, that means it gets updated in Dynamics, too!
5. Find out what the heck Marketing is doing.
Sales and marketing have a love-hate relationship in a lot of organizations. Sales depends on marketing for qualified leads, marketing depends on sales to close the leads. Sales feels like marketing wouldn’t know what “qualified” was if a prospect came banging on the door begging for service, marketing feels like sales just cherry picks the easiest prospects and whines about the rest.
Let’s take a step and look at the root cause: sales and marketing almost never talk to each other! Not so with Lead Liaison. You have an insight to the inbound and outbound marketing efforts your prospect has received. The data marketing collects is stored in their prospect profile, so you have just as much insight as your marketers.
This is embodied in two of our Lifecycle Stages: Marketing Qualified and Sales Qualified. This is a two-step process to allow both teams to equally vet new prospects. No more working separately; it’s time for sales and marketing to both be a part of the funnel once and for all.
When that qualified account becomes an Opportunity, we’ll pick that up from Dynamics and automatically move them to the Opportunity Lifecycle Stage. And on the wonderful day you get to click Closed-Won, we’ll move them to the Customer Lifecycle stage. You’ve got your deal, and marketing can move on to generating new leads.
If Microsoft Dynamics and Lead Liaison are not a win-win for sales and marketing, then I really don’t know what is. We hope you enjoyed this article on 5 ways sales teams benefit from Microsoft Dynamics CRM and marketing automation integration! For more information on Lead Liaison’s integration of LMA and Microsoft Dynamics CRM see this page.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.png00Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2017-10-25 12:50:202017-10-25 12:50:205 Reasons Sales Teams Benefit from Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Marketing Automation Integration
What are the 5 ways marketing teams benefit from Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Marketing Automation integration?
In this article we’ll discuss 5 ways marketing marketing teams benefit from integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM with marketing automation. Sales reps have always had their system of record, a CRM. A CRM is a common repository, a place to keep notes, contact information, and opportunities. Besides a need for pulling reports, marketers never had the need to access the CRM. The demand for businesses to grow, increased competition, and advancement in software as a service, has fostered a new suite of software capabilities – commonly referred to as marketing automation. Marketing automation is a suite of software services that help marketers do their job better and more efficiently. The problem is that marketers have their software to work with, and sales has their own. By integrating the two systems together sales and marketers can share data and help each other get the job done faster. In particular, there are 5 ways marketing teams benefit from Microsoft Dynamics CRM and marketing automation integration:
Integrated views that include prospect activity.
Better segmentation.
Trigger actions on data changes.
Integrated lead qualification.
Data is in sync.
Integrated Views
A marketing automation platform, such as Lead Liaison’s Lead Management Automation software, helps marketers with outbound marketing, as well as inbound marketing. One key aspect of these platforms is being able to track all inbound marketer and engagement with outbound marketing. A marketing automation platform will build rich profiles of prospects as they download documents, watch videos, click paid ads, submit forms, visit web pages, and more. This information is crucial sales insight that needs to be available to sales reps in real-time. When integrating marketing automation and Microsoft Dynamics, this insight is mapped to Lead and Contact records in Dynamics. As a result, a sales person never has to leave Microsoft Dynamics to understand how their Lead/Contact has engaged with their company. It’s all inline in the Lead/Contact record.
Better Segmentation
Marketers used email systems like Mailchimp and Constant Contact before marketing automation existed. In the “olden days”, a marketer would use a “batch and blast” approach. They’d create a single email and send that email to a large list. With modern marketing platforms, marketers can easily segment their database. Not only can they use demographic data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM (things such as job title, industry, location), they can segment off of engagement data. For example, easily build a one-time list, or ongoing list that’s dynamically created, of all prospects who’ve had inbound activity within the past 30 days, live in five states, and downloaded a specific piece of content. What’s the point? Instead of demographic criteria, they’ve got more criteria to choose from, allowing them to build smaller segments (groups) of people to better tailor the message to a recipient’s interests. This helps marketers deliver a more personalized message – driving higher click through and open rates with email.
Trigger Actions
Marketers have greater control over how and when they send follow up content for nurturing when integrating marketing automation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Using automation, a marketer can monitor changes in a data field to detect if the value changes to any matching criteria. When this happens, the marketer can execute any number of tasks. For example, if the Lead Status field changes to Customer, they could trigger an automation that onboards a client and walks them through the customer experience, getting them closer to cross-sell and upsell opportunities down the line.
Integrated Lead Qualification
Prior to having marketing automation integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, all leads look the same to a sales rep. In other words, the database is flat. The only way to differentiate leads is to use some sort of weighted scoring system. Marketing automation platforms refer to this as Lead Scoring, in Lead Liaison’s world it’s simply Scoring. For example, when your key documents, such as Case Studies, get downloaded, individual scores can be assigned to the action. With granular level control over scoring various interactions with prospects, the marketing automation system sums all individual scores into a single score, which is then shared with Microsoft Dynamics CRM in a Score field. Now, sales can create reports that give priority to their Leads and Contacts. Reps can make better use of their time by focusing on the highest scoring Leads and Contacts first.
Data is in Sync
With sales reps having their own stack, and marketing having theirs, it would be awful if the two systems did not communicate with one another and had data out of sync. With systems like Lead Liaison and Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrated, marketers don’t have to worry about disparate systems. When Lead, Contact, and Opportunity data changes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it also gets updated in Lead Liaison…and vice versa. Marketers are not slave to the way the data exchange works either. They can set which fields in the CRM map to fields in the marketing automation platform, and set the syncing direction. For example, if the marketer never wants the marketing automation platform to update the Lead Source in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, then they can set the sync direction to one-way, going from CRM to marketing automation only – and not the other way around.
https://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.png00Lead Liaisonhttps://www.leadliaison.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Lead-Liaison-Logo5.pngLead Liaison2017-10-19 09:17:412017-10-19 09:17:415 Reasons Marketing Teams Benefit from Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Marketing Automation Integration
Allen, TX – Lead Liaison, a leading sales and marketing solutions provider, announced today the launch of their 
